Research has shown a possible causative link between playing the popular videogame
Tetris and improvements in Mental Rotation performance. The aim of the
present study was to address a question about an aspect of Tetris expertise that
had not yet been factored into any of the existing work on Tetris and Mental
Rotation. David Kirsh and Paul Maglio (1994) have shown that skilled Tetris
players appear to use physical actions as substitutes for, or compliments to,
mental operations. This is hypothesised to include physically rotating game
pieces instead of Mentally Rotating them. The specific question we sought to
address in the present study was whether these physical substitutes for mental
operations, which Kirsh and Maglio call epistemic actions, have an effect on
Tetris' efficacy as a Mental Rotation training task.
In order to address this research question, three groups of subjects were administered
tests of Mental Rotation ability before and after a five week training
period. The training period consisted of a total of five, hour long, laboratory
sessions - evenly spaced across the training period - in which each of the
three groups were required to play an assigned video-game. The results showed
that a group of subjects (N=13) who received Tetris training on the version of
the game that made epistemic actions involving rotation impossible showed no
greater Mental Rotation performance gains when their results were compared to
a group of subjects (N=13) trained using a Standard version of Tetris. This suggests
that the occurence of epistemic actions does not have an impact on Tetris'
efficacy as a Mental Rotation training task. Further, neither of these two groups
showed greater Mental Rotation performance gains than the non-Tetris control
group (N=14), a result which suggests that, at least under some circumstances,
Tetris training fails to impart Mental Rotation performance gains any greater
than what can be expected due to retest effects. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2013.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ukzn/oai:http://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za:10413/9301 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Kaye, Blaize Michael. |
| Contributors | Spurrett, David. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en_ZA |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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